Buying Red Light Therapy in Norway: Why Trust Can Cost You

By Dominic Lamb – LightTherapy.no

Here's something I genuinely love about Norway. You can leave your bag outside a supermarket and it will be there when you come back. Bikes get left unlocked outside cafes in city centres. Doors in some parts of the country don't get locked at night. Not because people are naive, but because there's a deeply embedded social contract here that says: we don't do that to each other.

It's one of the highest-trust societies on earth. Having come from the UK, where you'd have to be in a very specific mood to leave your bike unlocked outside a corner shop, it took me a while to fully absorb. And honestly, even now I find it moving.

That same trust is being deliberately targeted

The same assumption of good faith that makes Norway function so well is being deliberately targeted by a certain type of operator in the wellness market. And the red light therapy space in 2026, which has grown fast and attracted the full spectrum of people it always does when a market grows fast, has some notable examples of exactly this. I want to talk about it, not to be dramatic, not to throw elbows at competitors, but because people deserve to know what's happening.

What the market looks like right now

Let me describe something and see if it sounds familiar. You're looking at a red light therapy product. The website is clean, well-designed, confident. There's a page of expert reviews or a testing comparison that looks authoritative, maybe with a professional-looking woman in a white coat or a doctor's name attached. There are hundreds of reviews, five stars, all enthusiastic. There's a banner across the top: "72-hour sale, 40% off," which, if you check back next week, will still be running. An Instagram ad shows up in your feed. Then another one.

Everything about it signals: this is legitimate, this is trusted, buy now before you miss it.

Here's what's actually going on in at least some of these cases. The expert review page is an AI-generated content site. The questions and answers are produced by a bot, the entire thing funnels back to the same product, and the independent testing is nothing of the sort. The doctors whose pictures appear have no connection to the product and possibly no connection to photobiomodulation at all. Their credibility is being borrowed without their knowledge.

The review count is inflated, not through real customers having real experiences. The 72-hour sale has been running for six months. This is a classic scarcity tactic: create urgency, get the purchase made before the rational brain has time for due diligence. It works. It works especially well in high-trust environments where the implicit assumption is that people are being straight with you.

And the product itself? I know some of these manufacturers. I know what the devices actually cost to produce properly. Not all cheap devices are bad and not all expensive ones are good, but there are specific corners being cut in specific ways that the buyer has no way of knowing about from a product page.

Why Norway specifically

In markets with lower baseline social trust, people approach purchasing with a certain default scepticism. They expect to be sold to. They assume the review might be dodgy. It's exhausting, and I'm not romanticising it. But it does provide some protection against manipulation.

Norway doesn't work like that. And why would it? The society functions beautifully on a foundation of assuming people mean what they say and are who they claim to be. But that same baseline assumption of honesty, applied to an Instagram ad from a company founded eighteen months ago whose reviews were written by nobody who actually bought anything, leaves people genuinely exposed in a way they wouldn't be if they were buying from someone they could look in the eye.

The operators who understand this are not subtle about exploiting it. Norway has excellent purchasing power, a growing wellness market, and a population that tends to trust what looks professional. It's not an accident that some of these operations specifically target Scandinavian markets. I find this properly irritating, not just because it affects my business, but because people are making health decisions based on fabricated authority.

What legitimate actually looks like

A verifiable track record means not how long the website has existed, those can be created overnight, but genuinely operating with real customers who've had time to use the products and come back with feedback. Years, not months. Anyone can look good for six months. Sustained trust takes longer.

Specific, testable product claims matter more than almost anything else. Not "red and near-infrared wavelengths" as a description, but actual nanometre figures: 630 nm, 660 nm, 850 nm. If the company can't or won't tell you the specific emission wavelengths, that's a gap worth noting. I test mine with a spectrometer, which is not standard in this industry but should be. I've sent products back because the measured output didn't match what was claimed. Let me give you three concrete examples of why this matters.

I recently received a batch of panels from a supplier I generally trust, specified as 810 nm and 830 nm dominant. When I measured them, they came in closer to 850 nm. Not dangerously different, but not what was ordered. I went back, explained what I'd found, and got the correct specification sent out. The point is that even with trusted suppliers, batch variation happens. Without testing I would never have known. Neither would you.

Second example: a supplier with cheaper panels that looked interesting. When they arrived and I put the spectrometer on them, I found weak LEDs with only a couple of chips actually in the right wavelength range. The irradiance figures were nowhere near what's required for a therapeutic dose. It was pure marketing dressed up as a product. I didn't stock them. But someone without test equipment would have bought them, used them, probably concluded that red light therapy doesn't work, and moved on without understanding why.

Third example: blue light blocking glasses from a brand claiming to block 100% of blue light. The test report said something entirely different. That's why my amber lenses are marketed as blocking 97%, not 100%. Because I have the test report and can see the actual figures. I could have said 100%. It would have sounded better. It would not have been true.

Reviews that read like people are the next thing to look for. Real reviews are uneven. They mention specific things. They sometimes say "it arrived quickly but the instructions were a bit confusing" because real experiences have texture. A page of uniformly ecstatic five-star reviews with no texture, no specifics, no occasional minor complaint is a pattern worth pausing at.

Authority that's actually connected to the subject matters too. What is the doctor or expert's actual field? What have they published? A cardiologist's face on a red light therapy page doesn't make the device better. It makes the marketing more expensive. Those are different things. And pricing that makes physical sense rounds it out: components, chips, drivers and build quality standards cost what they cost to produce properly. A device priced well below that isn't a bargain. It's a different device than the one described.

A word about AI content farms

In 2025 and 2026 a particular kind of operation has emerged that creates what looks like an independent review or comparison site, complete with credible-sounding questions, real user testimonials, maybe a name that sounds like a Norwegian health publication. The whole thing is generated and maintained by AI. The answers sound authoritative without ever being specific. They agree with the premises of questions in a way that feels slightly too smooth. And if you follow the trail far enough, every path leads to the same product page. If something feels like it was written by someone who read about the subject without ever having actual experience of it, it probably was.

Trust is valuable, not naive

The answer to "the market has some bad actors" is never "stop trusting people." The Norwegian model of high social trust produces genuinely better outcomes across almost every measure of human wellbeing. Don't lose that.

What it does require is a small recalibration for environments that aren't operating by the same social contract. The bag outside the supermarket is safe because the person who might take it is embedded in the same community and faces real social consequences. The Instagram ad is being served by an algorithm with no community, no consequences, and no shared contract with you whatsoever. The same good faith. Applied differently. That's all.

I've been selling these devices in Norway for years now. My name is on the business. I live here, in Drammen. I'm part of this community. I test what I sell and I stand behind it because when someone has a question or a problem, they can find me. That's a different operating model from a company that exists primarily as a funnel and whose accountability ends at the checkout page.

That's not me asking you to trust me specifically. That's me describing what trustworthiness actually looks like in practice, so you can apply that filter wherever you're buying from. The bag by the supermarket is still safe. Just be a bit more careful with the Instagram ads.

Questions about specific devices you've seen and want a straight answer on? Get in touch. See the full panel range if you want to see what properly specified actually looks like, or the FAQ page for more guidance.